Orders Up To 40 Aircraft

Chile's LAN Airlines has signed a contract to purchase 25 A320 family aircraft, with options for 15 more, following up on a previous announcement. LAN will also become the first customer to accept delivery of the A318 airliner powered by the new Pratt & Whitney PW6000 engine, which is due to be certified by the end of 2005.

"We are pleased to see the excellent performance of LAN,” said Airbus President and CEO Gustav Humbert in a company release. "We are honored with this new order and we are confident that these new aircraft will allow LAN to expand even further throughout the region."

The order will bring LAN's total Airbus fleet to 59 airplanes, with the aircraft scheduled to be put into service on LAN's domestic network in Peru, Chile and Argentina. Some of the new A318s and A319s stipulated in the order will be used to replace LAN's current fleet of Boeing 737-200s, and will be poweed by IAE-V2500-A5 engines.

More than 3,600 Airbus A320 Family aircraft have been ordered to date, with more than 2,500 planes delivered so far. Nearly 200 customers and operators currently fly A320-variant aircraft.

FMI: www.airbus.com, www.lan.com